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First Age

05-17-2018, 10:48 AM

Lore question here... How long was the First Age? I ask, because as I was working with one of my players last night to create some evocations for his 4-dot artifact axe, we were looking at eh era portion of the sample artifacts in Arms of the Chosen. They had these really neat names, but every single Artifact has a different era. That led me to wonder, "How many eras are there? How ;long is an era? How long was the First Age? How long have mortals (to include Exalted) existed in Creation?"

How many eras? We don't know.
How long is an era? Variable, not the least because some of the eras in arms overlap or are local terms
How Long was the first age? I want to say somewhere it was said to be around 1000 years, but also not stated.
How long have mortals existed? Since the Age of Dreams. Also not defined in lore.

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Lukkychukky in third edition you will not likely find hard answers about the chronology from before the Scarlet Empress took the throne. This is intentional by the Devs to give storytellers the space possibkebto make it what they wish. Just my 2 cents.

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Lukkychukky in third edition you will not likely find hard answers about the chronology from before the Scarlet Empress took the throne. This is intentional by the Devs to give storytellers the space possibkebto make it what they wish. Just my 2 cents.

That makes sense. I just didn't know if there was any kind of canon I'd be going against if I said the First Age lasted 8,000 years, or that there have been 20 "ages" since the dawn of time.

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First and Second Edition made the First Age about 3,500 years long; Third Edition ups that to around 5,000 years. This is described on page 20 of the core book.

​Don't mind all of the stuff with thousand-year daiklaves and the like; whatever the prior developers intended for the concept, it's basically been dropped entirely by the new ones (and I honestly don't think it's much of a loss).

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(And in 2nd edition, the First Age was surely well over 4000 years: Autocthon has been in Elsewhere for 5000 years, and the First Age ended 768 years ago.)

I thought it was 786 since the Empress crowned herself. Then again, I'm tired.

But also, who says the time measurements in Autochthonia were accurate to Creation, considering it was an entire world away, and given the other worlds' tendencies to have time act weirdly in regard to Creation?

Every other realm of existence has some weird hangups when it comes to time passing in Creation: time is completely fluid in the Wyld, allowing you to spend a week there and come back to Creation to find a year has passed; the Underworld didn't have the passing of hours or days or seasons until the Calendar of Setesh was created, and when it broke, the Underworld's sun just hung overhead like it was stuck until the thing was repaired; time passes in the Demon City at the whim of the Yozis; time doesn't pass at all in Elsewhere. Hold on… does Yu-Shan have any temporal fuckery going on?

Also also, tangentially, am I misremembering, or did the way Autochthonian days were set up in 1e (5 5-hour periods making a 25-hr. day) get assumed to be a thing in Creation as well by a 2e author, leading to Creation having 25-hr. days in 2e?

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The Shogunate is part of the First Age. It's just not the High First Age. The Second Age starts with the Contagion, Balorian Crusade, Creation getting smaller*, etc.
90% of people dying and the entire world being invaded is, after all, far more significant than the Usurpation.

*Is that still canon?

"Wizard of Oz, you really are a wizard!"

2 likes

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The Shogunate is part of the First Age. It's just not the High First Age. The Second Age starts with the Contagion, Balorian Crusade, Creation getting smaller*, etc.
90% of people dying and the entire world being invaded is, after all, far more significant than the Usurpation.

*Is that still canon?

Umm wizard I believe Devs said end of first age is usurpation.

Comment

The Shogunate is part of the First Age. It's just not the High First Age. The Second Age starts with the Contagion, Balorian Crusade, Creation getting smaller*, etc.
90% of people dying and the entire world being invaded is, after all, far more significant than the Usurpation.

*Is that still canon?

One of the Devs, I think Vance, has said recently that the Second Age starts with the Usurpation.